58 Internet activists

Miriyam Aouragh is a Dutch anthropologist who specializes in social media and internet activism. She is senior lecturer at the University of Westminster.

Jacob Appelbaum is an American independent journalist, computer security researcher, artist, and hacker. He studied at the Eindhoven University of Technology and was formerly a core member of the Tor project, a free software network designed to provide online anonymity. Appelbaum is also known for representing WikiLeaks. He has displayed his art in a number of institutions across the world and has collaborated with artists such as Laura Poitras, Trevor Paglen, and Ai Weiwei. His journalistic work has been published in Der Spiegel and elsewhere. Appelbaum has repeatedly been targeted by U.S. law enforcement agencies, who obtained a court order for his Twitter account data, detained him at the U.S. border after trips abroad, and seized his laptop and several mobile phones.

Julian Paul Assange is an Australian editor, publisher, and activist who founded WikiLeaks in 2006. WikiLeaks came to international attention in 2010 when it published a series of leaks provided by U.S. Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning. These leaks included the Baghdad airstrike Collateral Murder video, the Afghanistan war logs, the Iraq war logs, and Cablegate. After the 2010 leaks, the United States government launched a criminal investigation into WikiLeaks.

Anthime Joseph "Tim" Gionet, more commonly known as Baked Alaska, is an American neo-Nazi, anti-semitic conspiracy theorist, social media personality and former rapper. Gionet gained attention through his advocacy on behalf of alt-right and white supremacist ideology, and through his promotion of anti-Jewish conspiracy theories such as white genocide and Jewish control of the media. He has also used the alias Tim Treadstone.

John Perry Barlow was an American poet, essayist, cattle rancher, and cyberlibertarian political activist who had been associated with both the Democratic and Republican parties. He was also a lyricist for the Grateful Dead and a founding member of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the Freedom of the Press Foundation. He was Fellow Emeritus at Harvard University's Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society, where he had maintained an affiliation since 1998.

Lina Ben Mhenni was a Tunisian Internet activist, blogger and lecturer in linguistics at Tunis University. She was internationally recognised for her work during the 2011 Tunisian revolution and in the following years.

Irina Bolychevsky is an activist and data specialist, focused on Open Data, decentralized technologies, and technical standards. She is currently director of standards and interoperability at the NHSX of the United Kingdom Government. She has been part of large organizations in those fields, including the Open Knowledge Foundation, the World Wide Web Consortium, and the Open Data Institute, and worked for the UK, Dubai and UAE government administrations. She co-founded Redecentralize.org, an advocacy group promoting decentralized technologies.

Fredrick Brennan is an American software developer and type designer who founded the imageboard website 8chan in 2013, before going on to repudiate it in 2019. Following 8chan's surge in popularity in 2014, largely due to many Gamergate proponents migrating to the site from 4chan, Brennan moved to the Philippines to work for Jim Watkins, who provided hosting services to 8chan and later became the site's owner.

Edith Yah Brou is an Ivorian writer and activist. A co-founder of the volunteer organization Akendewa and the online women's magazine Ayana, she is considered one of the most influential digital activists in Ivory Coast and a "prominent Ivorian blogger."

Henry Alfred Bugalho, known simply as Henry Bugalho, is a Brazilian YouTube creator, writer, translator and philosopher. Bugalho is also a fellow of the Royal Society of Arts.

Sheila Cameron is an American artist, blogger, graphic designer and producer based in California. She is mostly known for initiating the "Free Katie" campaign, in which she designed and sold merchandise in response to the news of Katie Holmes's engagement to Tom Cruise.

Suw Charman-Anderson is the former Executive Director of the Open Rights Group, a campaign group based in London. She is also a journalist, social software consultant, blogger and public speaker. On 15 February 2008 she married Kevin Anderson. Named one of the "50 most influential Britons in technology" by The Daily Telegraph, she has also worked to gain recognition for other women in technological fields, including by founding Ada Lovelace Day.

Yasodara Córdova, also known as Yaso, is an activist, coder, designer and researcher. Her work has focused on technologies to improve the democratic process, using open data, online identity, and privacy approaches. She is currently a research fellow at the Digital Harvard Kennedy School, and affiliate to the Berkman Klein Center at Harvard. She has been part of several Ministries in Brazil, the United Nations and the W3C. As an activist, she is co-founder and advisor of multiple initiatives around Internet hacktivism.

Primavera De Filippi is a legal scholar, Internet activist and artist, whose work focuses on the blockchain, peer production communities and copyright law. She is permanent researcher at the CNRS and Faculty Associate at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University. She is author of the book Blockchain and the Law published by Harvard University Press. As an activist, she is part of Creative Commons, the Open Knowledge Foundation and the P2P Foundation, among others.

Cory Efram Doctorow is a Canadian-British blogger, journalist, and science fiction author who served as co-editor of the blog Boing Boing. He is an activist in favour of liberalising copyright laws and a proponent of the Creative Commons organization, using some of their licences for his books. Some common themes of his work include digital rights management, file sharing, and post-scarcity economics.

Daniel Domscheit-Berg, previously known under the pseudonym Daniel Schmitt, is a German technology activist. He is best known as the author of Inside WikiLeaks: My Time with Julian Assange at the World's Most Dangerous Website (2011).

Esther Grace Earl was an American author, internet vlogger, online personality and Nerdfighter, as well as an activist in the Harry Potter Alliance. Prior to her death from cancer in 2010, Earl befriended author John Green, who credited her for the inspiration to complete his bestselling 2012 novel The Fault in Our Stars. In 2014, Earl's writings were compiled with her biography This Star Won't Go Out, which appeared on the New York Times bestseller list for young adult books. Earl has been cited as an influential activist, with her family and online followers continuing to hold charity and fundraising events in her memory.

Alexandra Asanovna Elbakyan is a Kazakhstani computer programmer and creator of the website Sci-Hub, which provides free access to research papers without regard for copyright. According to Elbakyan, Sci-Hub has served over a billion science articles to its visitors since 2011.

Aliaa Magda Elmahdy is an Egyptian internet activist and women's rights advocate. She became known for publishing a nude photo on her Blogspot page, which she described on Facebook as "screams against a society of violence, racism, sexism, sexual harassment and hypocrisy". Since then she became a subject of several death threats. Elmahdy describes herself as a "secular, liberal, feminist, vegetarian, individualist Egyptian" and has identified as an atheist since turning 16.

Amal Fathy is an Egyptian democracy activist and human rights defender. She is a former activist of April 6 Youth Movement and a member of the Egyptian Commission for Rights and Freedoms. She continues to be detained under house arrest by the Egyptian authorities since January 2019 for speaking out about sexual harassment in Egypt.

Phineas Fisher is an unidentified hacktivist and self-proclaimed anarchist revolutionary. Notable hacks include the surveillance company Gamma International, the Sindicat De Mossos d'Esquadra and the Justice and Development Party.

Eva Galperin is the Director of Cybersecurity at the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and technical advisor for the Freedom of the Press Foundation. She is noted for her extensive work in protecting global privacy and free speech and for her research on malware and nation-state spyware.

Wael Ghonim is an Internet activist and computer engineer with an interest in social entrepreneurship.

Dan Gillmor is an American technology writer and columnist. He is director of News Co/Lab, an initiative to elevate news literacy and awareness, at Arizona State University's Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication.

John Gilmore is one of the founders of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the Cypherpunks mailing list, and Cygnus Solutions. He created the alt.* hierarchy in Usenet and is a major contributor to the GNU Project.

The Green brothers, John and Hank, are two American brothers, entrepreneurs, social activists, authors, and YouTube vloggers. The two extensively work together, having started their collaborative popularity with a daily vlog project in 2007 titled "Brotherhood 2.0", in which they only communicated in vlogs posted to YouTube for a year. The Greens' portfolio of online work now includes their main Vlogbrothers channel, Crash Course, SciShow, their podcast Dear Hank & John, and several others projects spanning a number of forms of media.

John Michael Green is an American author and YouTube content creator. He won the 2006 Printz Award for his debut novel, Looking for Alaska, and his fourth solo novel, The Fault in Our Stars, debuted at number one on The New York Times Best Seller list in January 2012. The 2014 film adaptation opened at number one at the box office. In 2014, Green was included in Time magazine's list of The 100 Most Influential People in the World. Another film based on a Green novel, Paper Towns, was released on July 24, 2015.

Laci Green is an American YouTuber. Her content focuses on sex education; Green also hosted Braless, the first MTV YouTube channel, as part of a 12-week deal with MTV. The first episode aired November 4, 2014. In 2016, Time named her one of the 30 most influential people on the Internet. In 2017, she celebrated her tenth anniversary on YouTube.

Jeremy Hammond is an American activist and computer hacker from Chicago. He founded the computer security training website HackThisSite in 2003. He was first imprisoned over the Protest Warrior hack in 2005 and was later convicted of computer fraud in 2013 for hacking the private intelligence firm Stratfor and releasing data to WikiLeaks, and sentenced to 10 years in prison.

Samer Hassan is a computer scientist, activist and researcher, focused on the use of decentralized technologies to support commons-based collaboration. He is Associate Professor at Universidad Complutense de Madrid (Spain) and Faculty Associate at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University. He is the recipient of an ERC Grant of 1.5M€ with the P2P Models project, to research blockchain-based decentralized autonomous organizations for the collaborative economy.

Andreas Heldal-Lund is a Norwegian anti-Scientology activist best known for operating the website Operation Clambake.

Maureen Johnson is an American author of young adult fiction. Her published novels include series leading titles such as 13 Little Blue Envelopes, The Name of the Star, Truly Devious, and Suite Scarlett. Among Johnson's works are collaborative efforts such as Let It Snow, a holiday romance novel of interwoven stories co-written with John Green and Lauren Myracle, and a series of novellas found in New York Times bestselling anthologies The Bane Chronicles, Tales from the Shadowhunter Academy, and Ghosts of the Shadow Market.

Erik Hjalmar Josefsson is a Swedish musician, campaigner against software patents, and internet activist.

Daniel Kaminsky was an American computer security researcher. He was a co-founder and chief scientist of WhiteOps, a computer security company. He previously worked for Cisco, Avaya, and IOActive, where he was the director of penetration testing. The New York Times labeled Kaminsky an "Internet security savior" and "a digital Paul Revere".

Mitchell David Kapor is an American entrepreneur best known for his work as an application developer in the early days of the personal computer software industry, later founding Lotus, where he was instrumental in developing the Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheet. He left Lotus in 1986. In 1990 with John Perry Barlow and John Gilmore, he co-founded the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and served as its chairman until 1994. In 2003, Kapor became the founding chair of the Mozilla Foundation, creator of the open source web browser Firefox. Kapor has been an investor in the personal computing industry, and supporter of social causes via Kapor Capital and the Kapor Center. Kapor and his wife, Freada Kapor Klein, invest in social impact tech startups that seek to narrow gaps in opportunity and access for underrepresented communities and attempt to eliminate barriers to full participation across the tech ecosystem. Kapor and Klein take a comprehensive approach to removing barriers in education and the workplace for all and fixing the leaks at every stage of the tech pipeline. Kapor serves on the board of SMASH, a non-profit founded by Klein to help underrepresented scholars hone their STEM knowledge while building the networks and skills for careers in tech and the sciences.

Rebecca MacKinnon is an author, researcher, Internet freedom advocate, and co-founder of the citizen media network Global Voices. She is notable as a former CNN journalist who headed the CNN bureaus in Beijing and later in Tokyo. She is on the Board of Directors of the Committee to Protect Journalists, a founding board member of the Global Network Initiative and is the founding director of the Ranking Digital Rights project at the New America Foundation's Open Technology Institute.

Alison Macrina is a librarian, internet activist, founder and executive director of the Library Freedom Project. Macrina is vocal in her opposition to digital surveillance, and was a core contributor and Community Team Lead on the Tor Project. She is the co-author of Anonymity, the first book in the American Library Association's Library Futures Series. She was also one of the librarians protesting the CIA's recruitment attempts at the American Library Association's annual conference in 2019, co-publishing a letter with librarian Dustin Fife entitled "No Legitimization Through Association: the CIA should not be exhibiting at ALA."

Heather Marsh is a philosopher, programmer and human rights activist. She is the author of the Binding Chaos series, a study of methods of mass collaboration and the founder of Getgee, a project to create a global data commons and trust network.

Nicholas Merrill is an American system administrator, computer programmer, and entrepreneur. He is the founder of Calyx Internet Access, an Internet and hosted service provider founded in 1995, and of the non-profit Calyx Institute. He was the first person to file a constitutional challenge against the National Security Letters statute in the USA PATRIOT Act and consequently the first person to have a National Security Letter gag order completely lifted.

Felipe Neto Rodrigues Vieira is a Brazilian-Portuguese manager, vlogger, actor, comedy actor, and writer. He is a well known YouTuber in Brazil with more than 42 million subscribers making his channel the 36th most-subscribed on the website. He started his YouTube career by talking about celebrities, movies, daily activities in some criticizing or comic way, being the first YouTube channel to reach 17 million subscribers in Brazil. He is also the brother of YouTuber Luccas Neto. Currently, his videos focus on general entertainment.

Pedro Noel is a Brazilian journalist and graduated philosopher. According to Romanian media, he is also an Internet media activist, known as 'one of those who made 700 thousand Spaniards take the streets' in 2011.

Philosophy Tube is a YouTube channel produced by the British actress Abigail Thorn. It began in 2013, when Thorn sought to provide free lessons in philosophy in the wake of the 2012 increase in British tuition fees.

Franchesca Ramsey, also known as Chescaleigh, is an American comedian, activist, television and YouTube personality, and actress, who has appeared on MTV and MSNBC. She gained media fame quickly after her YouTube commentary on racial issues went viral, and she built a career as a writer, producer, and performer based on her unintended activism, being thrust into a role as an advisor or coach on social issues.

Lila Grace Rose is an American anti-abortion activist who is the founder and president of the anti-abortion organization Live Action. She has conducted undercover, investigative exposés of abortion facilities in the United States, including affiliates of Planned Parenthood Federation of America.

Carolina Rossini is a Brazilian-American attorney who focuses on intellectual property, open standard, and data privacy. She is notable for her work in intellectual property law in her native Brazil. In 2016, she was selected as a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum.

Sad Puppies was an unsuccessful right-wing anti-diversity voting campaign run from 2013 to 2017 and intended to influence the outcome of the annual Hugo Awards, the longest-running prize for science fiction or fantasy works. It was started in 2013 by author Larry Correia as a voting bloc to get his novel Monster Hunter Legion nominated for a Hugo award, and then grew into suggested slates, or sets of works to nominate, in subsequent years.

Lilia Katri Moritz Schwarcz is a Brazilian historian and anthropologist. She is a doctor in social anthropology at the University of São Paulo, full professor at the Faculdade de Filosofia, Letras e Ciências Humanas in the same institution, and visiting professor at Princeton University.

Mona Seif is an Egyptian human rights activist known for her participation in dissident movements during and after the 2011 Egyptian revolution, for her creative use of social media in campaigns, and for her work to end military trials for civilian protesters. She is a biology graduate student, investigating the BRCA1 breast cancer gene.

Richard Matthew Stallman, also known by his initials, rms, is an American free software movement activist and programmer. He campaigns for software to be distributed in a manner such that its users receive the freedoms to use, study, distribute, and modify that software. Software that ensures these freedoms is termed free software. Stallman launched the GNU Project, founded the Free Software Foundation, developed the GNU Compiler Collection and GNU Emacs, and wrote the GNU General Public License.

Taren Stinebrickner-Kauffman is an Australian-American activist. She is the founder and was the executive director until 2016 of corporate watchdog SumOfUs. In March 2012, she and her group were active critics of working conditions at Apple Inc. supplier Foxconn.

Aaron Hillel Swartz was an American computer programmer, entrepreneur, writer, political organizer, and Internet hacktivist. He was involved in the development of the web feed format RSS, the Markdown publishing format, the organization Creative Commons, and the website framework web.py, and joined the social news site Reddit six months after its founding. He was given the title of co-founder of Reddit by Y Combinator owner Paul Graham after the formation of Not a Bug, Inc.. Swartz's work also focused on civic awareness and activism. He helped launch the Progressive Change Campaign Committee in 2009 to learn more about effective online activism. In 2010, he became a research fellow at Harvard University's Safra Research Lab on Institutional Corruption, directed by Lawrence Lessig. He founded the online group Demand Progress, known for its campaign against the Stop Online Piracy Act.

Dmytro Borysovych Tymchuk was a member of parliament of Ukraine, a Ukrainian military expert and blogger, an officer of the Ukrainian military reserve, and one of the coordinators of the Information Resistance blog. During the ongoing 2014 pro-Russian unrest in Ukraine, he became one of the most popular Ukrainian online activists and was extensively cited on the situation in the country.

UBERMORGEN.COM is a Swiss-Austrian-American artist duo founded in 1995 and consisting of lizvlx and Hans Bernhard. They live and work in Vienna, Basel and S-chanf near St. Moritz in the alpine Engadina valley in Switzerland.

Piotr Waglowski, known online as VaGla, is a Polish lawyer, poet, publicist and webmaster, open government activist, researcher of communication processes in the paradigm of social constructionism.

Stephen Gary Wozniak, also known by his nickname "Woz", is an American electronics engineer, computer programmer, philanthropist, and technology entrepreneur. In 1976, he co-founded Apple Inc. with business partner Steve Jobs, which later became the world's largest information technology company by revenue and the largest company in the world by market capitalization. Through their work at Apple in the 1970s and 1980s, he and Jobs are widely recognized as two prominent pioneers of the personal computer revolution.

Jillian C. York is an American free-expression activist and author. She serves as Director of International Freedom of Expression at the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), and a founding member of Deep Lab. She is the author of Silicon Values: The Future of Free Speech Under Surveillance Capitalism and Morocco - Culture Smart!: the essential guide to customs & culture.

Randi Jayne Zuckerberg is an American businesswoman. She is the former director of market development and spokesperson for Facebook, and a sister of the company's co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg. Prior to working at Facebook, she was a panelist on Forbes on Fox. As of May 2014, she is founder and CEO of Zuckerberg Media, editor-in-chief (EIC) of Dot Complicated, a digital lifestyle website, and creator of Dot., an animated television show about a young girl who uses technology to enhance both her educational experiences and recreational activities.

Ethan Zuckerman is an American media scholar, blogger, and Internet activist. He was the director of the MIT Center for Civic Media, and Associate Professor of the Practice in Media Arts and Sciences at MIT until May 2020, and the author of the book Rewire: Digital Cosmopolitans in the Age of Connection, which won the Zócalo Book Prize. He is now an associate professor of public policy, communication and information at the University of Massachusetts.